A chill goes through the country as another young girl is abducted

Something like 4,600 children are abducted by strangers each year. It's a horrifying figure, but usually the parents' and child's hideous ordeal is short-lived. According to organizations that help find missing children, only about 200 to 300 are kidnapped in the traditional sense, that is, taken by strangers for a long time, for ransom or worse reasons. About half of those never come home.

To which category Elizabeth Smart belongs was unclear last week. In the early hours of Wednesday the 14-year-old disappeared from her bedroom in the most agonizing of circumstances. Her abductor crept into the seven-bedroom home in the...